A business or enterprise may store information about various entities in the form of electronic records. For example, a company might have an employee database where each row in the database represents a record containing information about a particular employee (e.g., the employee's name, date of hire, and salary). Moreover, different electronic records may actually be related to a single entity. For example, a human resources database and a sales representative database might both contain records about the same employee. In some cases, it may be desirable to consolidate multiple records to create a data store that contains a single electronic record for each entity represented in the database. Such a goal might be associated with, for example, a master data management program.
Currently, the consolidation process in a master data management program is a time consuming and operation. For example, several different consolidation rules might be applied in sequence, and each application might require a separate database query and/or a creation of an intern version of the data until a final record is created. Such an approach, however, may be impractical when a substantial number of records and/or input data sources are involved (e.g., hundreds of thousands of source records may need to be consolidated).
Accordingly, a method and mechanism for efficiently and accurately handling and/or merging input data records may be provided in accordance with some embodiments described herein.